Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering -- (BLUF, Principles, Execute Principles, AuthS.).

• BLUF: Platform engineering is a discipline-practice (not a framework) that focuses on building and maintaining a self-service platform for software development teams. An Internal Developer Platform (IDP).  -- GOAL -- To empower developers to build, deploy, and manage their applications with greater speed and autonomy. It achieves this by providing a curated and well-supported set of tools and infrastructure, often referred to as a "Golden Path," that abstracts away the underlying complexity of the infrastructure.

• Guiding Principles. (5)

  1. Developer Experience (DevEx) First: The platform should be designed with the end-user—the developer—in mind. The tools, documentation, and workflows should be intuitive and reduce friction.

  2. Self-Service: Developers should be able to provision resources and deploy applications on their own without needing to file tickets or wait for a separate operations team. The platform should be a product with a clear user interface and API.

  3. Automation: Manual processes are a source of errors and delays. Everything from infrastructure provisioning to application deployment and monitoring should be automated.

  4. Security and Compliance by Default: Security controls and compliance policies should be built into the platform from the start. Developers should be able to follow the "Golden Path" and know their application is secure and compliant without extra effort.

  5. Continuous Improvement: The platform is not a one-time project; it's a product that needs to evolve. Feedback from developers should be used to continuously improve the platform's features, performance, and usability.

• Steps to Execute the Guiding Principles. (4)

  1. Define the "Golden Path." -- (A well-supported set of tools and architecture).

     • Identify the Core Technologies: Choose the primary technologies for your platform, such as Kubernetes for container orchestration, a specific CI/CD toolchain, and a preferred cloud provider.

     • Establish Standards: Define a set of standards and best practices for things like security configurations, logging formats, and resource tagging. The golden path should be the easiest way for a developer to build and deploy an application that meets all of these standards.

     • Create Templates and Blueprints: Develop pre-configured templates for common application types (e.g., a Python microservice, a Node.js web app). These templates should include all necessary files for deployment, monitoring, and security.

  2. Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

     • Select an IaC Tool: Choose a tool like Terraform or Pulumi to define your infrastructure. This allows you to manage and provision (provide, supply) your infrastructure using code, which can be versioned, reviewed, and automated.

     • Centralize and Version Code: Store all your IaC configurations in a central repository like Git. This enables version control, collaboration, and a clear audit trail of all infrastructure changes.

     • Automate Provisioning: Integrate your IaC code into a CI/CD pipeline. This means that any changes to the infrastructure code are automatically tested and applied, reducing the chance of human error.

  3. Practice Chaos Engineering (aka Resilience Testing).

     • Start Small: Begin by running simple experiments in a non-production environment. For example, test what happens when a single instance of a service fails.

     • Hypothesize and Measure: Before running an experiment, form a hypothesis about how the system will react. Use monitoring and logging tools to measure the actual impact and compare it to your hypothesis.

     • Automate and Integrate: Once you've established confidence in your chaos experiments, automate them and integrate them into your continuous delivery pipeline. This ensures your systems are continuously tested for resilience.

     • Learn and Improve: Use the findings from chaos experiments to improve your platform and applications. This could involve making services more fault-tolerant, improving monitoring, or updating runbooks.

  4. Foster a Product Mindset.

     • Treat the Platform as a Product: The platform team's "customers" are the developers. The platform should have a roadmap, a backlog of features, and a clear feedback loop with its users.

     • Establish a Support Model: While the goal is self-service, the platform team must provide support and clear documentation. This includes creating runbooks, FAQs, and a clear communication channel for developers to report issues or ask for help.

     • Measure Success: Use metrics to track the platform's success. This could include developer satisfaction, lead time to deployment, and the number of incidents caused by infrastructure issues.

  5. AuthS.

     • The guiding principles for platform engineering are not typically dictated by a single, monolithic "authoritative source" in the same way that a federal mandate like NIST or a financial standard like GAAP is. Instead, they have emerged from the collective experience and best practices of leading technology companies and a growing community of practitioners.

     • Organizations and thought leaders whose work has been foundational in shaping these principles: (5)

       1. Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF): As the home of Kubernetes and many other cloud-native technologies, the CNCF community has been at the forefront of defining platform engineering. They provide a broad "platform landscape" and host conferences and meetups where these ideas are debated and refined. Their focus on the "product mindset" and developer experience has been particularly influential.

       2. Gartner: As a leading research and advisory company, Gartner has been a key voice in bringing platform engineering to the attention of a broader corporate audience. Their analysts have published numerous reports and articles defining the practice, predicting its growth, and outlining its core tenets, such as the focus on developer self-service and the use of Infrastructure as Code.

       3. Microsoft and Other Major Cloud Service Providers (CSP): Companies like Microsoft, through their "Platform Engineering Guides" on Microsoft Learn, have been instrumental in translating these principles into practical guidance for their customers. Their documentation and architectural recommendations often reflect and reinforce the core principles of developer experience, self-service, and security-by-default.

       4. Industry Leaders (e.g., Team Topologies): Books and frameworks like "Team Topologies" by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais have provided a strong conceptual foundation for how platform teams should be structured and how they should interact with other teams (like those building business applications). The concept of a "paved road" or "golden path" for development is a direct outcome of this kind of thinking.

       5. Practitioner Communities: The principles are also heavily shaped by the experiences of platform teams at companies like Netflix and Spotify, which pioneered many of these concepts. Their public blog posts, presentations at conferences, and open-source projects have all contributed to a shared understanding of what works and what doesn't.

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